Rex Smith: Journalism’s unforced errors

Goodness knows we all make mistakes. Take, for instance, the Wimbledon championships, now under way in London. In last year’s tournament, the 37,895 shots counted on the two main courts including 1,866 unforced errors.

Flubs by the world’s best tennis players make me feel just a bit better about my undependable forehand. I take no comfort, though, in the mistakes made Thursday by CNN and Fox News in reporting incorrectly the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act.

As we all stared into our TV screens shortly after 10 a.m., the two cable networks reported within seconds of each other that the court had struck down the law as unconstitutional. Less than a minute later, other networks reported the opposite.

Wires reported what CNN had said, then substituted their own reporting to the contrary. Twitter seemed at war with itself. Surfing around channels revealed pretty quickly that CNN and Fox had misread the decision.

CNN fixed its error after six long minutes. I’m not sure when Fox got around to it. In fact, Fox still hasn’t admitted that it even got it wrong. “Fair and balanced” seems not to include “honest about mistakes.”

The problem, the networks tumbled over each other to explain later, was in the way that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s majority decision. He first declared that the law’s crucial individual mandate couldn’t stand under the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause, then a few lines later pivoted and wrote that based upon a different test — the power of Congress to levy taxes — the law was, indeed, constitutional.

Nobody should minimize the challenge of reporting a complex court decision on deadline. I recall watching Pete Williams and Dan Abrams on NBC in 2000 as they paged through the Supreme Court’s crucial Bush vs. Gore decision and became the first journalists to report correctly that George W. Bush had been elected president. Their work was smart and clear; it stated only what they knew. A few hours before Thursday’s decision was announced, Abrams, now at ABC, cautioned reporters. “I remember how many got it wrong on Bush v. Gore,” he wrote on Twitter.

What usually lies behind mistakes of this sort is the drive to be first with news. It’s a fool’s game. With so many news sources available nowadays, people aren’t likely to remember who got a story ahead of its competitors by a few seconds or minute, but they will remember who got it wrong. CNN’s brand as a reliable news source has been damaged by this incident (Fox’s less so because of the unrelenting loyalty of its audience).

Mistakes are amplified nowadays, too, by the power of social media. In the first four hours after it was issued, the decision prompted 1.9 million Twitter mentions. Among them, if my Twitter feed is any indication, were thousands of folks razzing CNN and Fox.

Their mistakes, after all, are like those unforced errors at Wimbledon: they brought it on themselves. That’s not the same as when a source passes along bad information.

Take, for example, coverage of Ronald Reagan’s shooting in 1981. Initially, the White House assured the world that the president had not been hit by bullets. When word came that he had been shot in the chest, ABC’s usually unflappable Frank Reynolds slapped his forehead, shouted, “My God!” and angrily demanded that an off-camera producer “speak up” about what he knew. He was furious about broadcasting an untruth, even though it wasn’t his fault.

My great mentor, the legendary investigative reporting teacher Mel Mencher, was absolutely intolerant of errors. “Getting the facts straight is the basic hack minimum,” he would say.

Even so, I made mistakes as a young reporter. One prompted my editor to send a memo to the entire newsroom denouncing my error as “the height of idiocy.” He didn’t use my name in the memo, nor did he need to: I was the guy frozen at my desk, afraid to move lest I be noticed and fired on the spot.

My mistake had been trusting one source’s interpretation over another in reporting on a lawsuit that I had heard about on deadline.

I couldn’t get my hands on the court decision that night, so I interviewed a plaintiff and a defendant and, inexplicably, chose one to believe. The “idiocy” my editor cited was in pushing the story forward rather than waiting a day to get the court papers.

It’s not all that different from what CNN and Fox did in trumpeting the court decision before reading a few sentences further. Ambition fuels the push to be first; wisdom suggests it should be trumped by the imperative to be right.

13 Responses

Your statement about Fox News is categorically untrue (and I do not believe that your error was unforced).

Fox News had live coverage with a reporter standing outside the Supreme Court building. She received the text and began reading it, beginning at the beginning. She said something to the effect that the mandate was ruled unconstitutional based on the Commerce clause, kept flipping and then said the mandate was ruled unconstitutional based on something else (cannot recall right now). Between those two statements the Fox crawl stated that the mandate was struck down.

Fox went back to the studio where Megyn Kelly and Andrew Napolitano were doing commentary. Within a minute, Napolitano said to hold on because he was reading on blog (SCOTUS-Watch or something like that) that the mandate was upheld based on something besides those first two reasons. They cut to the reporter who was flipping, flipping through the decision looking. Cut to Kelly saying that they are hearing conflicting things and then to Napolitano saying he is hearing upheld from the blog and the source on that blog is someone he knows and trusts. Cut to reporter at the Supreme Court building who had flipped far enough and found that the decision was upheld as a tax.

It was probably less than a minute before Napolitano gave the initial warning, less than two before Kelly said on air that there was conflicting information out there, and less than five minutes before they said that the mandate was indeed upheld.

I understand that many people, including yourself, dislike and distrust Fox because of their differing (but equal) perspective from your own. And you may have good reason for that. However you don’t have to lie about what they do or don’t do because then you put your own credibility on the line.

From Rex: Go back and look at the coverage again: Both networks left their Chyron announcing the supposed overturn of the law in place for too long (CNN longer than Fox). CNN subsequently issued an apology for the incorrect information; Fox’s statement did no such thing, but instead claimed that the initial incorrect report was merely (as you say) a result of reading the top of the decision. An incomplete reading that led to hundreds of thousands of viewers (and Twitter readers) being given “news” that turned out not to be true is an error. Both networks presented untruth to their viewers. In both cases, it was bad journalism, which one network acknowledged and apologized for and another did not. I believe BL’s comment supports my point that Fox’s loyal viewers are unlikely to hold their favored network to account for this, but htat CNN’s brand has been damaged.

I had it on and I watch Fox among other networks. I wouldn’t call myself a “loyal viewer” but if you feel it cast your own view in a better light, then feel free to label me as such. I merely recanted the exact sequence of events with respect to what happened. If it’s only their apology that will make you feel better and vindicates your point (meaning the fact that they said that they were correcting their first report within minutes and stated that the tax issue was buried (which you seem to have acknowledged repeatedly) is insufficient) then why not contact them?

Did you ask the networks for an apology in the Gore v Bush election for calling it incorrectly? Have you ever had a “Dewey wins moment and corrected it without supplication? Heck, even on this bill are you asking all your Congressmen for an apology for saying that the mandate was not a tax when it has now been incontrovertibly defined as such.

It’s actually a great general topic – apologies. No matter what you do (especially celebrities or lawmakers), an apology wipes the slate. In contrast, as we see here, doing the tangible thing, fixing the problem, being substantive carries no weight unless you mouth the words.

…BL, you miss the point of Rex’s column which was that two media outlets rushed to get the decision ahead of the other and both were wrong. Bad journalism in both cases.
Both outlets “corrected” the mistake. In one case, the outlet apologized for presenting an incorrect version as it presented further facts. In the other case, the outlet presented further facts, skipped over the fact they had it wrong “first”, and went on as if nothing happened.
Given those two scenarios, which would you trust to be “fair and balanced” in the future, the media outlet that admits it made a mistake, or the outlet that continues along, unaware or uncaring that it presented “the largest television news audience” with the wrong facts.
I think the main point of Rex’s column is the first rule of good journalism (pushed to a footnote in the rulebook these days): Get it first, but get it right!

Of course. That’s acknowledged in the column’s first sentence, and in what I discuss about my own personal experience making mistakes, and in the corrections we run whenever an error is published. When a quarterback retires and becomes a play-by-play commentator, he doesn’t fail to note an interception just because he threw a few of ‘em himself. I thought I was pretty clear about my own failures.

Now, to me at least, journalism’s worst unforced errors occur when you reprint or retransmit blatantly false or untruthful information. To print lies and fabrications, of any kind, with the power of 8 point headlines behind them, and then use “Well, we are just printing what someone else said” as a reason, is editorial malpractice and wrong.

Fox News also briefly ran a headline saying, “Supreme Court Finds Health Care Individual Mandate Unconstitutional.” [Update: Michael 'Clemente, executive vice president of Fox News said in a statement, “We gave our viewers the news as it happened. When Justice Roberts said, and we read, that the mandate was not valid under the Commerce clause, we reported it. Bill Hemmer even added, be patient as we work through this. Then when we heard and read, that the mandate could be upheld under the government’s power to tax, we reported that as well -- all within two minutes. By contrast, one other cable network was unable to get their Supreme Court reporter to the camera, and said as much. Another said it was a big setback for the President. Fox reported the facts, as they came in.”]‘

Rex, I am happy to have provided you with the information, which you said you were unaware of (“I’m not sure when Fox got around to it”).
In the interest of being “honest about mistakes,” I encourage to be honest about your mistake, admit that you were wrong, and move on.

It’s somewhat surprising that you didn’t take advantage to add an excellent and timely post-script to your blog piece and talk about ABC’s misinformation and retraction about Aurora. It is somewhat different than your above examples as Brian Ross’s shoddy work is less likely a rush to be the first with news as a predisposition to believe, but overall I think it fits nicely with your overall point.